After about 2 years of using Rails, I realized that I haven’t updated my rubygems installation since I first started. I started to upgrade by downloading rubygems 0.9.3 and running the setup.rb and I encountered the following error:

hook C:/downloads/rubygems-0.9.3/rubygems-0.9.3/./post-install.rb failed:
install directory # not absolute

Since I work on Windows, the various forum posts didn’t help me much, including the recommendation to edit the post-install.rb. In the end, I removed rubygems completely, thanks to Jim Weirich, by following the instructions on his forum post (reposted here for posterity):

1. Remove C:\ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\rubygems.rb (file)
2. Remove C:\ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\rubygems (directory)
3. Remove c:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\source_cache (file)
4. Remove c:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\cache (directory)
5. Remove c:\ruby\bin\gem (executable file)
6. Remove c:\ruby\bin\gemwhich (executable file)
7. Remove c:\ruby\bin\gem_server (executable file)
8. Remove c:\ruby\bin\gem_mirror (executable file)
9. Remove c:\ruby\bin\generate_yaml_index.rb (executable file)
10. Remove the RUBYOPT environment variable

Finally, download and install rubygems 0.9.2. Hopefully, this will help those doing Windows development to upgrade their rubygems to the (almost) latest version. If anyone has success with installing 0.9.3 on Windows, please let me know.

[tags]ruby, ruby on rails, rubygems, ruby on windows[/tags]